Social media has certainly become a powerhouse industry, offering opportunities for the average person to make a living, whether it be as a side hustle or as a full-time career.
According to specialist staffing company Xpheno, social media jobs are on the rise, and at the time of the findings, 240,000 social media-specific roles had been created. The increase in social media jobs and career paths will likely increase with the growth in AI and automation.
Advanced technology is transforming the way we view and interact with social media, so it’s important for anyone looking to explore a career to master these tools.
Having an awareness as well as using tools that utilize automation and artificial intelligence will only help you with your own career growth, your efficiency in the workplace, and your creative output.
How AI is reshaping social media careers
AI is already reshaping current employees within social media roles, whether that’s taking on new responsibilities that make use of AI or exploring new opportunities. Whether that’s generating content through platforms like ChatGPT to analyzing user data through AI-powered data analytics.
Professionals nowadays, within all aspects of digital business, need to develop AI fluency in order to remain proficient.
Opportunities created by automation
Automation is often helpful in reducing repetitive tasks like scheduling content or responding initially to direct messages. The manual effort of such ends up wasting valuable resources as a result. The use of automation also helps to open new strategic roles within many businesses that exist on social media, too.
With the benefit of AI skills on your resume, it helps to differentiate yourself from other professionals who are on the job market at the same time.
Future-proofing your career
In this digital world, you must be future-proofing your career by getting on board with AI and automation. However, some human skills remain essential when striking a balance with reliance on AI.
Emotional intelligence, for example, is one of the human skills that can’t be replicated by AI and therefore requires human intervention at times. The same goes for creativity and innovation. While AI generates content around data, it can’t think freely like humans are able to.
That’s why it’s good to know what human skills are needed when working with AI and how AI-driven tools remain useful to implement, like the Rezi ATS resume checker.
An AI resume checker is useful for spotting things you might not see, which ultimately may help you get the job you’re after.
Essential AI tools every social media professional should know
Mastering AI tools is an important step that’s critical when existing in the social media domain. There are different categories of tools, each helping in its own way. Whether that’s aiding decision-making, creativity, or improving efficiency.
For example, AI generates captions, videos, and visuals in general. Such tools might include:
- Lexica Art – For creating blog thumbnails
- Hemingway app – To help with content editing
- Canva – For visual creations and editing needs
- Surfer SEO for content optimization
There are also plenty of scheduling and management tools that help to save time and improve the organization as a whole. It might be worth considering Agendrix’s scheduling software, which helps with cross-platform posting.
The ability to post content across multiple platforms all at once helps boost engagement. Partner that up with automated engagement communications, and you’re looking to have a tech within your stack that becomes a real godsend.
The use of AI-powered tools to assess analytics is great for helping improve content decisions before any time or effort is spent on them. Data analytics is incredibly useful for tracking performance, as well as forecasting trends and generating automated reports.
This level of commitment and in-depth analysis is the hallmark of a switched-on social media worker.
Building an AI-enhanced skill set
To build an AI-enhanced skill set that you’re able to proudly show off on your resume and prove within a new role, you’ll want to develop these types of skills successfully.
Technical, strategic, and creative skills are all essential and required to fully leverage AI to your advantage in the field of social media.
Technical confidence
Technical knowledge encompasses everything that encompasses tools themselves and all the data that comes with it, which needs understanding
You’ll likely use several AI tools, all of which require you to be proficient in. From automation workflows to streamline processes, to interpreting analytics for decision-making.
Coding is not required for social media use because the platforms are designed to be accessible and intuitive. Regardless of technical skill, unless you’re becoming a coder specifically, the end-user experience that most get will not need coding knowledge.
Strategic and creative growth
While artificial intelligence is useful for many reasons, it’s still somewhat underdeveloped in its creative abilities, which is where your role as the overseer of these tools.
When using AI to be creative in your role, it’s important to ensure brand voice is maintained and that you’re keeping the content original. The problem with artificial intelligence is that it gathers content from the internet, and so often enough, this content isn’t always original in its creation and may lack the creative flair it requires.
Continuous learning and adaptation
It’s always beneficial to stay up to date with AI trends. You’ll want to build your own personal toolkit to help utilize AI technology to the best of your abilities, as well as integrate yourself into communities. Networking with other AI-focused professionals helps keep you in the loop of what’s working and what isn’t.
Integrating AI into your daily workflow
As you venture into your social media career, it’s always beneficial to audit your current processes and identify the areas of improvement. By auditing your processes, it’s good to see what could benefit from automation.
To streamline workflows and help maximize productivity as a result, here are some helpful steps:
- Identify repetitive tasks – Any repetitive tasks should be identified and then automated to maximize productivity
- Define goals – From improving content output to converting more users to customers, goal-setting is incredibly beneficial.
- Select the right workflow automation solution – The right workflow might be a cloud-based solution, or you might have more specific needs.
- Train your users – Any users new to these tools will need to be onboarded successfully.
- Measure key performance indicators and improve your workflow –
With social media, creating and planning your content calendars is essential for productivity. Not only that, but AI helps forecast performance, as well as find the content on your profiles that’s worthwhile repurposing.
Setting up automated dashboards and reports is beneficial for providing crucial AI-driven insights for performance improvement and communicating ROI to stakeholders and clients.
Turning automation into career acceleration
When you’re looking to leverage automation for career acceleration, it’s essential to be fluent in AI and be proactive with automation. It’s not only essential for your own career development but for the sake of branding, portfolio building, and ultimately positioning yourself for new opportunities.
Branding yourself as an AI-savvy professional
For prospective employers to know about your AI skills and knowledge, it’s important to highlight this within your portfolios and resumes. For resumes, be sure to integrate skills across all sections and use actionable and quantifiable results to show proof of how AI has helped you find success.
In portfolios, it’s good to showcase high-performance projects, as well as using visuals effectively to make your AI use more engaging and understandable.
New roles and specializations
Whilst many existing social media roles are using AI for the benefit of productivity and career growth, many new roles are now emerging as a result of artificial intelligence.
The integration of AI into social media is moving from traditional, execution-focused roles towards more data-driven, strategic, and technical positions. Combining human creativity with AI proficiency helps to command higher salaries and drive significant value for companies in general.
Building your competitive edge
A competitive edge is a necessity to stand out from the crowd and impress not only new employers but your peers, too.
With that in mind, look at listing all relevant certifications on your resume and adjusting your portfolio so that it showcases the best of your work. Combining creativity and automation helps to create a long-term advantage in the future.
Next steps to accelerate your social media career with AI
AI and automation are helping to enhance rather than replace human work, which is important to understand, as many seem to think AI is inherently bad. By adopting the right tools and building skills within AI and automation, you’ll help to accelerate your own social media career in the future.
